Johnny Graphic and the Etheric Bomb

by D. R. Martin

  It winged the Steppe Warrior’s sword arm. Deflected him just enough to keep the blade from piercing Johnny’s neck.

  But not enough to prevent a nasty slice across Johnny’s chest, cutting open his tuxedo, shirt, and undershirt, lightly skittering over his ribs.

  Suddenly bloodied, Johnny hollered in pain, frustration, and rage.

  Kicking off her fancy shoes, Mel rushed forward to help him. Uncle Louie and Danny followed close behind. The two men tugged Johnny back toward the table. Meanwhile, Mel stopped to help a woman who was lying amid the balloons, holding her leg and sobbing dreadfully.

  Sitting in the chair, dazed from the pain of his wound, Johnny watched as Dame Honoria—with a kind of steely calm—slipped her silk brocade jacket back on, then buttoned it up. She took Nina’s hand with both her hands and whispered something in the girl’s ear.

  Nina looked up at Dame Honoria, then at Johnny—who was blinking back at her, his hands stained with blood from his chest wound. He was afraid Nina might start to cry, as she reached into her purse. Poor kid. She never deserved to get caught up in this mess.

  Nina fussed around with her purse’s contents, then withdrew a handkerchief, which she handed to Johnny.

  As he muttered a curt thank you and wiped his hands, he looked back in the direction of the bandstand and groaned, “No!”

  Burilgi had somehow captured Mel and held her from behind—in a deadly embrace.

  His dagger was pressed to her throat, where it drew a bead of blood.

  Chapter 62

  Seeing the blood on his sister’s neck, Johnny thought about rushing to her rescue. But that adult voice in his head told him, not so fast. If you try anything heroic, Mel could get badly hurt. Or worse.

  “Dame Honoria, come over here!” Mel wailed, her features a picture of dread. “Please!”

  “Of course, my dear,” Dame Honoria answered. She turned her head sideways. “Come with me,” Johnny heard her whisper to Nina, “but draw no attention to yourself.”

  The two walked slowly toward Mel and her captor, wending their way amid the debris.

  Johnny, Danny, and Uncle Louie shuffled along behind them, utterly disheartened and exhausted. Flo Zuckerberg, for her part, looked as though she wanted to kill someone but didn’t know whom or with what.

  By this time the colonel and the sergeant had managed to dispense with their adversaries. They stood a dozen feet from Mel, helplessly eyeing the wicked blade held directly over her jugular vein.

  As Dame Honoria and Nina came up within a few feet, Burilgi hissed, “Give me the diamond, old woman. Now!”

  Dame Honoria eyed the ghost and Mel.

  “It was around my neck just a few minutes ago,” she whimpered, sounding weak and beaten. “Now it’s gone. Came off somehow. Clasp broken. Somewhere around here.” She turned and swept a hand across a landscape of overturned tables, mangled chairs, and many, many balloons.

  By now almost every other party-goer had escaped. At the far end of the ballroom, by the entrance doors, Carlton Cargill was trying to keep several police officers from barging in.

  The Steppe Warrior betrayed no emotion. He seemed to be pondering Dame Honoria’s revelation.

  “Perhaps you’ve hidden it in your jacket, old woman,” the ghost said in a tone as cold as ice. “Let us see what’s inside your pockets.”

  Dame Honoria obligingly turned her pockets inside out, revealing no necklace. “And I suppose,” she said with a sigh, “you’d like to see what I have in my handbag.”

  Looking every inch the defeated old crone, Dame Honoria unsnapped the top of her black sequined purse and held it open for viewing.

  Burilgi seemed almost to be squinting, as he looked inside the bag. “Empty it.”

  Dame Honoria nodded and pulled item after item out of the handbag and threw them aside.

  A small mirror. Several tissues. A compact. Reading glasses. Lipstick. A tiny bottle of Gorton’s aspirin. Then she tipped the bag upside down, to prove there was nothing else inside it.

  “The diamond must be somewhere around here,” Dame Honoria said, scanning the floor nearby.

  Suddenly Burilgi’s head shifted slightly to the left and down. If he’d had eyes, they would have drilled holes right through Nina Bain. “You, girl,” he pronounced with frightening intensity, “open your bag.”

  Dame Honoria flinched and Johnny suddenly realized what she must have done. She had to have given the diamond to Nina for safekeeping. And now the ghost had her in his crosshairs.

  With a look of terrible sadness, Dame Honoria conveyed to Nina what the ghost wanted.

  Nina’s eyes opened wide as windows and she stammered, “M-m-m-me?”

  “Open it now,” the ghost ordered, “or my dagger slices a little deeper.”

  Mel quaked uncontrollably, her face a deathly white—a terrible contrast to the very red blood trickling down her neck.

  Dame Honoria repeated what Burigli had said.

  “Please, Nina,” sobbed Mel.

  “There’s nothing…in here…but my things,” Nina said breathlessly.

  “Tell the girl to show me,” Burilgi growled. “Empty the bag.”

  Johnny transmitted that order.

  “Okay,” squeaked Nina, unsnapping her purse.

  Johnny shut his eyes for a few seconds. He couldn’t stand to see what was about to happen. Then he thought the better of it. Eyes shut or open, it doesn’t matter. Hold it together. Be strong.

  Nina pulled open the top of her purse and removed its contents.

  Out came a tiny vial of perfume. A tin of breath mints. A compact. A coin purse. Then a pair of gloves that matched the color of her dress.

  “That’s all I have,” said Nina, looking defiant. “See?” Gulping, she walked up closer to Mel and the specter that she couldn’t see. She spread the top of the purse wide open with both hands. The spook peered intently at the inside. Then she tipped and shook the thing again, to make her point. All that wafted out were a few flecks of lint.

  Johnny was astonished. He was torn between relief that the diamond might be safe and dread that his sister might die.

  But what had Nina done with the Star of Gilbeyshire?

  Did she even have it in the first place?

  And where is it now?

  Chapter 63

  Wherever the giant black diamond might have gotten to, Johnny’s most pressing concern now was how to save his sister’s life. And, as his brain churned, he had to admit that he had only one idea. And not a very good idea, at that.

  Johnny managed to make eye contact with Colonel MacFarlane—who looked as if he were about to explode with frustration. Because he couldn’t think of anything else, Johnny made a fist with his right hand and punched it an inch or two forward. Which he hoped the colonel would interpret to mean “Attack!” The ghost soldier understood, but subtly shook his head. Just then a voice like a dull ax scraped over slate startled Johnny to attention.

  “You have five minutes to find the jewel, or the girl dies,” Burilgi announced, squeezing Mel even more tightly.

  Dame Honoria nodded, wiped her profusely sweating brow, and repeated Burilgi’s demand.

  Johnny and Nina and the others began to sift through the debris that littered the ballroom floor near their table, when another voice cut through the gloom.

  “No!” Mel yelled. “Stop! All of you!”

  Startled, Johnny and the others pivoted around to stare at the captive young woman. What could she possibly be up to?

  “What happens to me isn’t important,” Mel said. “You can’t let this monster have the diamond!”

  In response to Mel’s outbreak, Burilgi growled and lightly flicked the edge of his dagger against another spot on her neck.

  Mel winced in pain but didn’t scream. She kept talking, though so quietly and delicately that Johnny had to strain to hear her. As if she were speaking only for the ears of the empty-eyed wraith.

  “We etherists have tried for years and years
to convince the living that ghosts shouldn’t be feared, that ghosts were just like them—only dead. We’ve tried to give ghosts purpose and fulfillment. Something to make the emptiness tolerable.

  “But in a few short weeks you and Percival Rathbone and your other ghostly thugs have frightened millions. Killed innocent people who loved and cared for ghosts. Condemned thousands of specters to a doom worse than anything they could have imagined. Now even more people hate ghosts, fear ghosts. The damage you’ve done will take years to mend.”

  The dagger seemed to move, and the thought flared in Johnny’s brain: Is this the fatal cut?

  But nothing more happened. His racing heartbeat slowed slightly.

  “And your so-called khan?” Mel continued. “A fraud, a charlatan, a confidence trickster. Nothing he’s told you is the truth. He’s just a wretched, despicable human being. Well, former human being.

  “And you threaten my city with utter destruction. My city! Well, go ahead and kill me and be damned, you miserable excuse for a ghost. But when you do, don’t expect any mercy from my troopers here.”

  Colonel MacFarlane and Sergeant Clegg both nodded: order received and understood.

  In the midst of all this, Johnny heard the bullhorn voice of Carlton Cargill from across the ballroom. He was arguing with the police chief. “Listen, O’Reilly, you all charge in there and you’ll get that girl killed!”

  The Steppe Warrior pulled himself taut. “A very pretty little speech. But unless I get that jewel, you die in one minute.”

  At just that instant Mel’s face changed utterly.

  Her mouth opened in a gasp of surprise.

  Her eyes widened.

  A shudder resonated through her whole body—as if she were about to have a seizure.

  Burilgi seemed taken aback and he loosened his grip on Mel.

  Then the most remarkable and wonderful thing Johnny had ever seen in his entire life happened.

  Two small, ghostly hands popped straight up out of Mel’s chest.

  They grabbed the Steppe Warrior’s etheric dagger.

  They yanked it out of his hand.

  Then, bearing the blade, Bao shot up toward the ceiling like a rocket.

  With a furious grunt, Mel twisted violently and slipped from the grasp of a startled Burilgi. She part-danced, part-staggered away, screaming, “Get him, get him!”

  Both the colonel and Clegg came at Burilgi with flurries of powerful roundhouse punches. The Steppe Warrior hadn’t even the time to draw his sword.

  Clegg pummeled Burigli about the head and shoulders, and buried a nasty left hook into the Steppe Warrior’s mid-section again and again. The colonel attacked his kidneys from the back.

  Johnny had seen boxing matches and fights at school, but nothing nearly this brutal. The two dead cavalrymen were burning with rage.

  All that the eyeless assassin could do was to fend off the blows and, finally, try to plunge through the ballroom floor. He nearly made his escape.

  But the colonel—whose lightning quick reflexes hadn’t been dulled by all those decades in the ether—managed to grab a fistful of Burilgi’s pigtail. He held on with fierce tenacity, preventing the Steppe Warrior from slipping deeper into the floorboards. Then he yanked powerfully on the pigtail, ripping it and a piece of the ghost’s scalp entirely from his skull.

  Burilgi vanished.

  “Clegg, after him!” bellowed the colonel.

  Clegg dived down through the oak, as the colonel rushed to Mel’s side, still gripping his grisly trophy.

  Though his chest hurt like heckfire, Johnny wanted to jump up in the air, hug the colonel, and shout hurray. For the moment they had defeated Percy’s minions.

  Chapter 64

  “But where’s the diamond?” cried Mel, after receiving hugs from Dame Honoria and Uncle Louie. “This is all pointless if we don’t find the Star of Gilbeyshire! Zenith could still get blown up!”

  Johnny was thinking the exact same thing. He looked anxiously from Mel to Dame Honoria to Nina. Where was the gem?

  Dame Honoria turned to Nina, a look of profound worry on her face. “My dear,” she asked breathlessly, “what did you do with it?”

  Nina looked around warily. “Are the Steppe Warriors gone?”

  “For the time being, I should think so,” Dame Honoria answered. “Now Nina, where did you put the diamond?”

  “It’s in here,” said Nina, holding up her purse and snapping it open for Dame Honoria to examine.

  The old lady shook her head. “But there’s nothing there. Nothing at all, except—”

  “Except a zipper,” said Nina with a self-satisfied smile. “I showed him the inside of my purse, but I was guessing that the Steppe Warrior had never seen a zipper before.”

  With that, she unzipped the small side pocket inside the purse. She withdrew the Star of Gilbeyshire, resplendent and glittering in its titanium setting.

  “Oh, Nina!” exclaimed Dame Honoria, picking the girl up in a tremendous hug and twirling her around in a complete circle. “You are a genius!” Then her face went somber. “But…”

  Johnny’s smile faded out quickly at Dame Honoria’s use of that certain conjunction—usually signifying problems or objections. It was one of his least favorite words.

  “Yes,” said Uncle Louie, “but what?”

  “But we now have in our possession what is surely the deadliest weapon in existence,” Dame Honoria said. “And we have to decide what to do with it.”

  “Even though the new government is a big improvement over the old, I’m not sure I’d trust them with an etheric bomb,” said Mel, dabbing at the cut on her throat with a napkin.

  “Precisely,” Dame Honoria agreed. “That’s why we have to destroy it. Immediately. Irrevocably.”

  “But how?” Johnny asked. “It’s a diamond. Hardest substance on earth.”

  “Hard but brittle, John,” observed Uncle Louie. “Not indestructible.”

  “But what happens to all the ghosts inside it?” asked Nina. She held up the necklace and tried to see inside the big black stone. “Can we free them?”

  “I think I have an answer to all that,” said Mel, “now that we know the dimensions, the approximate weight, and the atomic structure of the bomb. Dame Honoria, what I’m thinking is—”

  Mel huddled with the old lady. They started talking in terms so technical and abstruse that Johnny had no idea what they were saying. There were various noddings and shakings of heads. Several equations and formulae were scrawled on paper napkins picked up off the floor.

  In the middle of all that technical chitchat, Johnny grabbed a couple of quick shots of the devastated ballroom. Injuries or not, he still had a job to do. Mr. Cargill would expect some pictures.

  Mel and Dame Honoria soon reached a consensus. And they would have to move quickly. They’d need to rely on Mr. Cargill and Mrs. Throckmorton to spring them from the anticipated attentions of the police. They’d require a quick visit to the hospital, to take care of Johnny’s new wound and check out Mel’s neck.

  Then a thought popped into Johnny’s head: where had Bao gotten to?

  After she snatched the dagger out of the Steppe Warrior’s hand, she had flown up through the ceiling. Ghosts always seemed to be flying up through ceilings. Johnny looked around the disordered ballroom and there she stood, up on the bandstand, peering pensively from behind the overturned bass fiddle.

  Johnny shuffled over through the balloons, right up to the edge of the bandstand platform. “Bao, what’s the matter?”

  The little girl ghost frowned and tiptoed slowly over to Johnny, for the moment substantially taller than him. Her chin trembled and she had that girl-about-to-cry look—never mind that she couldn’t. She held up her right palm and whimpered, “I cut my hand.”

  There was a nasty gash at the base of her index and middle fingers—showing muscle and bone and tendon underneath. Even though the wound didn’t bleed—a ghost being a ghost—it had to hurt Bao something awful. Johnny wonde
red if there was any way to give her stitches. Mel or Dame Honoria might know.

  Johnny surprised Bao and himself by reaching up, grabbing her by her tiny waist, and lifting her down. He’d never tried to hold up a ghost before and she was surprisingly light—though solid enough to feel real. He set her down on the dance floor and gave her a quick embrace. So what if she had a crush on him.

  “You were fantastic, you know,” he said. “Amazing. How did you think up that move?”

  Now she was smiling again, beaming, staring intently up at him. “I couldn’t let him hurt Sister. I was the only one small enough to go up through her body without being seen. Except for cutting my hand, it was easy.”

  Johnny beamed back. “Bao, you’re the bravest little girl I’ve ever met. Now I think there are some folks over there who’d like to thank you.”

  Chapter 65

  The long, black Kaiser Coronation limousine sat for several minutes just inside the entrance to the vast Acme Iron Works in West Zenith. It was the middle of the night, but angry red light erupted occasionally from the black, hulking structures spread across the landscape. The sounds of mechanical rumblings and metallic percussions were all around. Johnny could almost feel the vibrations in his bones.

  Everyone had jammed into the cramped passenger compartment. Johnny was squeezed in with Mel, Nina, and Flo in the backward-facing seat. Dame Honoria sat with Mr. Cargill, Uncle Louie, and Mrs. Throckmorton in the forward-facing seat, also mashed tightly together. Danny sat up front with the chauffeur.

  Johnny could see Colonel MacFarlane up on Buck, just between the limousine and the steel mill’s guard shack—with Bao in the saddle in front of him. She was jabbering away, just as any kid might have done after such an exciting evening.

  There came a rap of knuckles on glass and everyone turned to see a young, stoutly built man, clad in a red-and-black wool jacket over denim work overalls. A hard tin hat rested atop his head.

  Uncle Louie rolled down the window.

  “We have an okay from the president of the company,” announced the young man, still looking baffled by his late-night encounter with a limousine full of bedraggled New Year’s Eve revelers. “He said anything Mrs. Throckmorton should need, we ought to help with.”